How To Install reclass on Debian 10

Learn how to install reclass on Debian 10 with this tutorial. reclass is hierarchical inventory backend for configuration management systems

Introduction

In this tutorial we learn how to install reclass on Debian 10.

What is reclass

reclass is:

reclass is an “external node classifier” (ENC) as can be used with automation tools, such as Puppet, Salt, and Ansible. It is also a stand-alone tool for merging data sources recursively.

The purpose of an ENC is to allow a system administrator to maintain an inventory of nodes to be managed, completely separately from the configuration of the automation tool. Usually, the external node classifier completely replaces the tool-specific inventory (such as site.pp for Puppet, ext_pillar/master_tops for Salt, or /etc/ansible/hosts).

reclass allows you to define your nodes through class inheritance, while always able to override details further up the tree (i.e. in more specific nodes). Think of classes as feature sets, as commonalities between nodes, or as tags. Add to that the ability to nest classes (multiple inheritance is allowed, well-defined, and encouraged), and piece together your infrastructure from smaller bits, eliminating redundancy and exposing all important parameters to a single location, logically organised.

This package provides the reclass CLI and adapters for Salt and Ansible.

There are three methods to install reclass on Debian 10. We can use apt-get, apt and aptitude. In the following sections we will describe each method. You can choose one of them.

Install reclass Using apt-get

Update apt database with apt-get using the following command.

sudo apt-get update

After updating apt database, We can install reclass using apt-get by running the following command:

sudo apt-get -y install reclass

Install reclass Using apt

Update apt database with apt using the following command.

sudo apt update

After updating apt database, We can install reclass using apt by running the following command:

sudo apt -y install reclass

Install reclass Using aptitude

If you want to follow this method, you might need to install aptitude first since aptitude is usually not installed by default on Debian. Update apt database with aptitude using the following command.

sudo aptitude update

After updating apt database, We can install reclass using aptitude by running the following command:

sudo aptitude -y install reclass

How To Uninstall reclass on Debian 10

To uninstall only the reclass package we can use the following command:

sudo apt-get remove reclass

Uninstall reclass And Its Dependencies

To uninstall reclass and its dependencies that are no longer needed by Debian 10, we can use the command below:

sudo apt-get -y autoremove reclass

Remove reclass Configurations and Data

To remove reclass configuration and data from Debian 10 we can use the following command:

sudo apt-get -y purge reclass

Remove reclass configuration, data, and all of its dependencies

We can use the following command to remove reclass configurations, data and all of its dependencies, we can use the following command:

sudo apt-get -y autoremove --purge reclass

Dependencies

reclass have the following dependencies:

References

Summary

In this tutorial we learn how to install reclass package on Debian 10 using different package management tools: apt, apt-get and aptitude.